Hilary Rosen’s fancy footwork
p2p news / p2pnet: Last month erstwhile RIAA chieftainess Hilary Rosen went in record saying not only that lawsuits against students had, “outlived most of their usefulness,” but also that it was time for another look at DRM.
Now, in an interesting follow-up Q&A with Wired News‘ Eliot Van Buskirk, Rosen clarifies her earlier remarks stating, among other things, that what she said was, it’s a fair thing to question the ongoing value of the individual lawsuits now when there’s so much opportunity in the legitimate marketplace. I think it’s a fair thing to question: Have the lawsuits outlived their usefulness?
Wired went on, You seem to have said lately that DRM (digital rights management technology that prevents unauthorized copying) doesn’t make sense to you anymore. What made you come to that realization?
I have long been an advocate of interoperability, Rosen responded. I mean, that was one of my original goals when we started the SDMI initiative in the ’90s. I always thought that both security and interoperability were worthy goals, and I think people have really focused almost too much on the security part of it.
When I look at something like iTunes and the success of the iPod, I just think how much bigger the online music market could be if there were interoperability among the various services and the various devices. You can eliminate the DRM and essentially have sort of unprotected content sold everywhere. I’m not a particular fan of MP3 – I don’t think it’s as good audio quality – but, let’s say you did AAC or something else.
Obviously, Apple has a business strategy that says “proprietary” works for them. The record companies, I think, have tried to convince Apple to open up their system. I don’t think that’s been successful. The choice now is to either go unprotected so everybody has the same shot and the market expands, or to continue down what I think is an unfriendly path for consumers and the industry, because I don’t think it’s growing as fast as it can.
I understand there’s a rabid philosophy on both sides of this to protect or not to protect and I actually am not that black and white about it. I think if people want to protect their content, and want to have a DRM or a business model that limits its distribution, that’s okay. If others don’t want to, that’s okay too. That’s why I like Creative Commons. It’s all about choice. What I have focused on is what will most dramatically expand the music market at a time when device choices feel so limited and the service side is so underutilized.
Rosen even has a word or ten on downloading in Canada
Do you put any stock in the idea of taxing ISPs, sort of like what Canada has done? – asks Van Buskirk. I believe they have a tax there on equipment that enables people to download from P2P with impunity because they’ve paid this tax, though they still can’t upload. Do you see that as a viable approach or is that not enough choice?
Rosen says answers she’s not, a big fan of the government taking over the licensing structure but I do think that the fact that we have very strong copyright owner rights in this country behooves all copyright owners to be as thoughtful about their distribution strategies as possible.
But, she states, people ascribe more “evil motives” to the record companies or copyright owners than they deserve.
Evil motives to the RIAA? Perish the very thought!
These people are not in business to lock up their content and make sure you never get it, Rosen declares. Their business is only successful if you actually want their content and want to buy it and distribute it, so I think that there is probably extra rhetoric on both sides of that.
When Rosen, as boss of the RIAA, tried to carry the proposition, “This House believes that ‘the free music’ mentality is a threat to the future of music” during an Oxford Union student debate at Oxford University in Britain, she was soundly trounced. And music survived.
Stay tuned.
Digg this.
Also See:
RIAA chieftainess – RIAA’s Rosen on student lawsuits, June 6, 2006
Wired News – Hilary Rosen: Singing a New Song?, July 10, 2006
trounced – Oxford U and p2p file sharing, January 21, 2006
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July 10th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
Nest stop. Rosen promotes AllOfMp3.com
Because that’s what she’s advocating. Just maybe not at those prices. Yes. Yes. Yes. We would all love for there to be a mainstream authorised service that sold music in your choice of encoding with no DRM and priced by the megabyte. Because if FLAC exact copies of CDs sold for a little less than a CD (no packaging), then 192Kb MP3s would have to be cheaper. Which would put them around 50c a track or lower. And the whole house of cards would re-arrange itself.
And what does this mean?
âObviously, Apple has a business strategy that says “proprietary” works for them. The record companies, I think, have tried to convince Apple to open up their system.
I don’t recall anyone saying the record companies had asked Apple to remove fairplay. In fact the Apple Fanbois will tell you the only reason Fairplay is there is to satisfy the record companies.
July 10th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
I don’t recall anyone saying the record companies had asked Apple to remove fairplay. In fact the Apple Fanbois will tell you the only reason Fairplay is there is to satisfy the record companies.
The record cabal don’t want “fair”play removed, they want it to be interoperable with other DRM systems.
July 11th, 2006 at 1:30 am
âTheir business is only successful if you actually want their content and want to buy it and distribute it, so I think that there is probably extra rhetoric on both sides of that.â
This is precisely the problem. The purpose Rosen and her likes, is the sucess of business. But music is not about business success and profits. It is about culture.
Quality culture needs that the best works survive. But the success of business doesn’t need that. Al the is need is cultural junk food which is fed to the teen and teen minded consumer frenzy.
So, we mus ask what we want, business success or quality culture survival?
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
July 11th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
It’s so obvious that everything she said is only for “damage control”. She’d make a damned good politician